5 Steps to a 5: AP Psychology - McGraw Hill 2021

Levels of Consciousness
6 Biological Bases of Behavior
STEP 4 Review the Knowledge You Need to Score High

Although your current level of consciousness is basically limited to what is relevant to you and what you notice, other events can either become conscious or influence your conscious experience. Your preconscious is the level of consciousness that is outside of awareness but contains feelings and memories that you can easily bring into conscious awareness. For example, if asked what you ate for dinner last night, you could easily remember and tell. Your nonconscious is the level of consciousness devoted to processes completely inaccessible to conscious awareness, such as blood flow, filtering of blood by kidneys, secretion of hormones, and lower-level processing of sensations, such as detecting edges, estimating size and distance of objects, recognizing patterns, and so forth. For psychoanalysts, also known as psychodynamic psychologists, the unconscious, sometimes called the subconscious, is the level of consciousness that includes often unacceptable feelings, wishes, and thoughts not directly available to conscious awareness. According to cognitive psychologists, the unconscious is the level of consciousness that processes information of which you are unaware. The unconscious operates whenever you feel or act without being aware of what’s influencing you, whether it’s a stimulus from the current situation or from your past. Dual processing refers to processing information on conscious and unconscious levels at the same time. Don’t confuse the unconscious and unconsciousness. Unconsciousness is characterized by loss of responsiveness to the environment, resulting from disease, trauma, or anesthesia. Consciousness enables you to analyze, compare, and interpret experiences and allows you to integrate what you already know, what you perceive in the present, and what you anticipate. Consciousness can be altered by sleep, hypnosis, meditation, and drugs.